Billiards With a Bottle. And This Game Is Dying?

A leather bottle for bottle pool can cost as much as $50. Knocking one over earns 5 points; one goal of the complex game is to score exactly 25 points.Credit
Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times

MY latest addiction started with an otherwise innocent executive pursuit of a way to escape the summer heat on eastern Long Island. I found it in the cool semi-darkness of a Southampton poolroom, and it involved a bottle. Instead of containing whiskey or beer, this particular bottle was 6¾ inches tall and made of leather, and it served as the centerpiece of an arcane but surprisingly accessible game called bottle pool.

Bottle pool combines elements of billiards, straight pool and chess under a set of rules that lavishly rewards strategic shot making and punishes mistakes with Sisyphean point reversals. But it is basically a form of ritualized warfare with cue sticks, as I discovered in a three-sided match against two venerable masters who insisted that I refer to them by their bottle pool monikers, the Boss and the Judge.

The Boss is a lanky 75-year-old former banker who throws his head back when he laughs, which is often, and calls himself “a banana” when he misses a shot, which is not very often. A scion of one of America’s oldest families, he has played bottle pool for over 30 years, racking up numerous singles and doubles championships. A friend claimed to have traced his billiards lineage to a Knight Templar who fought in the Crusade of 1096-99.

The Judge is a 90-year-old former municipal court jurist, lean as a cue stick and many times sharper. In college, he was a star football player and pole vaulter, and later, a semipro baseball player. He still claimed to have 20-15 vision, he still smoked cigarettes and drove his own car, and he was looking down at the pool table while most of his contemporaries were looking up at it from their graves.

Suddenly, I saw a chance to hang out in a poolroom without risk of my wife exiling me to Chateau Bow Wow, a k a the Doghouse.

My due diligence confirmed I was not alone in my newfound infatuation. According to a survey by the National Sporting Goods Association, pool and billiards games attracted 36 million participants in the United States in 2005, 37 percent of them female. That was up from 32.3 million in 1998, and almost half again the number of people who played golf.

Although bottle pool’s origins remain obscure, records of various tournaments indicate the game dates at least to the 19th century. It once had an avid following among University of Michigan faculty members. Now its most active venues are private enclaves in New York City like the Racquet Club and the Union Club. A longtime member of both clubs estimates there are fewer than 1,000 bottle pool players nationwide.

Despite its elitist image, bottle pool has potential populist appeal. It can be played relatively inexpensively by two, three or four players at a time. The required equipment consists of cue sticks, a standard-sized pool table with six pockets, a cue ball, two object balls, and of course, a bottle. Save for the bottle, all those items are available in most public poolrooms for rates starting at under $10 an hour. Bottles range from about $3 for plastic models to $50 for traditional leather models.

Bottle pool also offers challenges that are, to my mind, far more diverse and intriguing than either pool, where you use the cue ball mainly to sink object balls in pockets, or billiards, where you use the cue ball solely to carom off the object balls. If some of the rules are complex, the object is simple: you try to complete the three legs of the game before your opponents. And you can keep your turn as long as you keep scoring points.

Before starting a match, players flip coins to determine their shooting order. The table is set up with the red and yellow object balls resting against the rails at the foot end, and the bottle resting on its mouth in the dead center. The winner of the coin flips places the cue ball behind an imaginary line near the head end of the table, and then shoots at one of the object balls.

In the first leg, you can score three ways: by sinking object balls pool-style, earning 1 point for yellow and 2 points for red; by caroming the cue ball off both object balls billiards-style for 1 point; or by caroming the cue ball off an object ball and knocking over the bottle for 5 points. The trick is to score 25 points and only 25 points. If you “go over” (say, by knocking over the bottle after already amassing 21 points), you have to restart the first leg and work your way back up to 25.

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The goal in the second leg is to score two billiards points. But if you unintentionally sink an object ball without making a billiard on the shot, you lose your turn. In the final leg, you have to make an intentional “scratch” in which the cue ball caroms off the yellow object ball and disappears into a called pocket.

The Boss and the Judge gave me a clinic on bottle pool strategy and shot making. But the pointers they shared and the stories they told around the pool table were also wise object lessons in life. Lesson No. 1 concerned ego.

Like many novices, I’d never played billiards, but I fancied myself a pretty fair pool player. My instinct was to repeatedly sink the one-point and two-point object balls, while ignoring chances to knock over the bottle with a five-point carom or keep my turn going with higher percentage one-point billiards. I figured I could simply out-shoot my elder opponents, whose hands shook visibly when they wielded their cue sticks.

“Pride goeth before a fall,” I said with false modesty after making a low percentage table-length shot on one of the object balls.

“Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit goeth before a fall,” the Boss corrected. “Chapter 16 in the Book of Proverbs.”

Sure enough, I missed my next shot, and had to cede the table to the Boss. Using a mix of billiards shots and cue ball caroms on the bottle, he amassed the 25 points he needed in the first leg. His turn ended when he miscued on a relatively easy billiards shot. “I can’t execute since I quit smoking,” he complained.

The Judge leaned over the table with a Marlboro Light dangling from his lip. By now, he had already completed the second leg, and he was telling a story about a hunting trip in Alaska at the end of World War II that proved to be lesson No. 2, a true-life parable of culture clash. Along with a guide and an Army buddy, he’d trekked deep into the wilderness to find a herd of moose gathered beside a watering hole.

“I didn’t want to shoot because the moose were just standing still, and there wasn’t any sport in it,” he recalled. “The guide said, ‘We’ve come all this way. Shoot one.’ So my Army buddy shot one. A few minutes later, a band of Indians came out 0f the woods and butchered it. Then they started waving their arms at us and pointing at another moose. The guide said, ‘They want you to shoot that one now.’ ”

The Judge paused, took aim on the cue ball, and scratched it off to win the match. I asked him what happened to the second moose. “I shot it,” he replied with a triumphant grin, “and we watched the Indians butcher it, too.”

Lesson No. 3 was the payoff. In keeping with bottle pool custom, the Boss and I paid the Judge $1 each for his victory. Then the three of us set up the table for another match.

E-mail: pursuits@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C5 of the New York edition with the headline: Billiards With a Bottle. And This Game Is Dying?. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe